Individual Judgement

O9A

The Authority Of Individual Judgement – Interpretation And Meaning

The authority of individual judgement is one of the fundamental axioms of the esoteric philosophy of Anton Long and thus a fundamental principle applicable to how that esotericism is presenced in the praxises of the Order of Nine Angles (O9A/ONA).

This axiom means that even the writings of Anton Long, and his esoteric philosophy, are only guides, a necessary beginning, and possess no ultimate authority:

“We see our way as guiding a few individuals to self-awareness, to Adeptship and beyond, via various practical and magickal techniques. The emphasis is on guide, on self-development, on self-discovery. There is no religious attitude, no acceptance of someone else’s authority […]

I claim no authority, and my creations, profuse as they are, will in the end be accepted or rejected on the basis of whether they work (Satan forbid they should ever become dogma or a matter of faith). I also expect to see them become transformed, by their own metamorphosis and that due to other individuals: changed, extended and probably ultimately transcended, may be even forgotten. They – like the individual I am at the moment – are only a stage, toward something else.” {1}

For the axiom of the authority of individual judgement means that each O9A person, nexion, group, or cell, are – with one important exception – free to develop their own interpretation of everything O9A, free to develop and change everything O9A, and that there is no authority above the individual, or beyond each group or collective of groups. No leader, no outer (or inner) ‘representative’, no council, no ‘old guard’, who can make pronouncements about or declare what is or is not correct. No ‘official’ or ‘genuine’ O9A; no ‘heresy’; no proscription of individuals or groups. Furthermore, no consensus is necessary or required among those who are or who associate with the O9A {2}, although naturally a particular O9A nexion may have or arrive at a particular internal consensus and thus presence a particular interpretation of matters O9A.

The axiom the authority of individual judgement also means that each O9A person, nexion, group, or cell, will use their own judgement in respect of what they do; in how they, individually and/or as part of an O9A nexion, ‘presence the dark and manifest the sinister’ in practical ways.

Honour and The Code of Kindred-Honour

The one exception regarding individual interpretation, and changing everything O9A, is the O9A Code of Kindred Honour. It is exempted because it is the Logos of the O9A – the unique perceiveration that distinguishes the O9A – and thus defines who is, and who is not, O9A. For to be O9A is to live by the O9A code and thus to manifest that logos by one’s manner of living.

Furthermore, the O9A code is not about honour, not about honourable behaviour towards others, per se. Rather, it specifies how a person relates to those of their own kindred, to other O9A folk. Thus, in respect of one’s kindred there are certain expected standards of fairness, of honour, but those standards do not apply in respect of how O9A folk relate to and deal with mundanes.

In respect of honour in general:

“One either has this personal quality (or the potential to possess it) or one does not: intellectual debate about it is irrelevant.” {3}

Which means that how someone who is O9A relates to and deals with mundanes is something each O9A person – or cell, nexion, or group – works out, decides, for themselves. Thus, if some person or some nexion did some deed or deeds, in relation to a mundane or in relation to some mundanes, that some other O9A person or people considered was dishonourable, would that make that deed or those deeds wrong from an O9A perspective? Not necessarily, for it would be a matter for each individual and/or nexion to decide for themselves:

“[One of the] practical guidelines of the Order of the Nine Angles is that there is no morality – no judgement about what is right and what is wrong – but our own individual one, with that judgement born not from feelings nor from some reaction to some particular event, but from a detached, reasoned, reflexion arising from practical experience. In short, from our own individual pathei-mathos, and the personal unique sinister weltanschauung that we develope from such practical experience, such reflexion, and such pathei-mathos.” {4}

Similarly in respect of what has been described as the ‘criteria of mundaneness’, with a mundane generally considered to be an adult, of sound body and mind, who does not live by the Code of Kindred Honour, and with the threshold of adulthood generally considered to be sixteen years of age, with some veering toward a threshold of fourteen and others toward eighteen.

Is this criteria – first explicitly clarified by Anton Long in 2011 {5} – therefore, given that it was authored by Anton Long, an exception to the authority of individual judgement? If so, is it an authoritative, infallible, definition applicable to all who are O9A, making those who do not accept it, for whatever reason, not O9A?

Given the foregoing, the answers should be obvious. It is for each individual to decide – to judge – for themselves, based on what they personally feel, on what they personally know, honour is. For they are the ultimate authority of what is ‘right’ and what is ‘wrong’. Not some consensus; not what someone else writes or says; not what a majority believe or assert; not what some group or organization declaims; not what some government or State enshrines in some law or laws; and not what some zeitgeist suggests or impels some people to feel.

“Living by the Code of Kindred Honour (aka the Law of Kindred-Honour aka The Logos of the Order of Nine Angles aka the Sinister Code, aka the Law of The New Aeon) together with a striving to follow one of the three O9A Ways is what makes someone O9A.”

The three currently existing O9A ways are the initiatory hermetic Seven Fold Way, the Way of the Drecc/Niner, and the Way of the Rounwytha.